Workflow software and services are common in many industries. Workflow software may be used to accomplish or aid in several occupational or industry specific tasks. Workflow software may include any software that performs or aids in accomplishing a discrete job-related task. Examples of workflow software may include inventory management software, personnel tracking software, accounting software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, and trip or event planning software. Workflow software often is customized for a given industry or occupation to provide optimal functionality. For example, a workflow designed for a health care provider may have built-in functions for handling health insurance payments, or complying with government regulations.
However, a substantial number of industries, occupations, and roles that may benefit from workflow software may be too small to support the costs involved in developing specialized workflow software. These industries, occupations, or roles may be unable to support commissioning the development of or otherwise purchasing workflow software tailored to their needs. To solve this problem, a maker of workflow software may try to reduce costs to the industries by generating revenue through advertisements displayed within the workflows, in addition to or rather than simply selling the workflow software.
However, although advertisements displayed in a workflow may generate additional revenue, the focused and customized nature of workflow software may result in general purpose advertisements failing to generate significant success rates. Further, identifying particular advertisers of interest to a given industry, occupation, or role may be difficult without specialized knowledge or experience corresponding to the industry, occupation, or role. A member of an industry may not trust advertisements of products or services from vendors not known to the member and without recommendations from other members of the industry. Significant costs may also be involved in manually contacting potential advertisers, and manually selling the advertising space available in workflow software. Selling advertising space within a workflow may also be difficult if the potential advertiser is unsure of the demand of users of the workflow for an advertiser's product or service.
Thus there exists a need to efficiently leverage the knowledge of workflow software users to locate potential advertisers and advertisements for workflow software. There further exists a need to leverage this knowledge in an efficient, automated way to produce targeted, trustworthy advertisements within workflow software.